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"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"
So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.
First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.
So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.
Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?
I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.
Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?
"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"
So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.
More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!
I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.
And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.
"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."
You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!
"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."
I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.
So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.
You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.103 -
Haven't slept in the last 72 hours, eaten in 24 and shaved or showered in 48+ .. but it is such a delight to move the project to production an hour before the deadline and two hours later to receive an angry phone call from the client because there is 'horrible bug' in the web system - the logo of his company wasn't showing, only the name ... the moron never sent us a logo to begin with, only a MS word document with the company's information and a compressed 200x80 logo in the bottom ...12
-
Client: Hey, you're the IT guy right?
Me: Hey, how can I help?
Client: Yeah for some reason I've lost power to my computer
Me: *Checks power, all computers are down due to a power cut*
Me: You'll have to contact your power supplier as you've lost power to all computers and lights.
Client: What, but the computers are not working right? - that's you're job not mine
Me: That's not how it works.
Client: Fix this or I'll bill you for the loss of money we've encountered during this and report this to your boss.
Me: How about I bill you for my time and advice and inform by boss that you tried to blame me for a power cut.
Client: You can try.
Me: *walks off and puts time in the ticket, requests purchasing to send an invoice*
2 Days later:
The client does not pay the invoice.
Me: (phone call) Hi, an invoice has been sent to you and we haven't received payment yet.
Client: were not paying that, you broke our power and made our computers break
Me: null22 -
I was told that my comment on another rant needed to be its own rant. So here it is:
I had a client that runs a tattoo shops website to be updated and more modern. He wanted nothing to do with looking at or approve mock ups or designs so I just did my thing and took care of it. Once I was finished I showed him what I had and said “now I just need some content from you all so I can replace all the placeholder text and images”.
He seemed completely onboard. Took down notes of all the content needed, assigned all of it out to his artists to gather what I needed and provide it to me.
After 6 months, and several emails asking if they ever got that content together I finally get a response:
“LOOK MAN, if you didn’t want to do the site then you shouldn’t have accepted the money. I know you don’t need all these from us to finish up, you’re just stalling! I need the site up now!”
So I’m like “Sure man, I’ll publish it exactly as it stands now.”
An hour later I get a call “who are these people in these pictures? Why do you have our pricing all wrong? Why is everything in French or something (Lorem ipsum)? I just need my money back at this point.”
I explained that he’s not getting his money back because I already did my part, but just because it’s important to me that a client is satisfied (and seemingly what he wants is money) I can waive his hosting fee for the next 3 years.
It’s been a year now. Sites still up in all “French”, wrong pricing, random stock photos. Couple weeks ago he called to apologize for being a dick before.
Still haven’t gotten any content to finish up.
I don’t understand. It’s like these people think if you want to publish a book for instance that you just give the publisher the title you came up with and they’ll fill in the pages with story/info for you.
I’m a web developer, not a content manager.39 -
Shared screen with a client over Skype. Showed them in Postman that their API wasn't working as expected. It was expecting a json. Instead it was giving error code 400 instead of 200.
Message :
"Error: No error. All OK"
I'll never forget the words of the client:
"Don't use all this fancy software, you don't know how to call APIs, open Internet Explorer or chrome and paste it in the bar. You'll see All OK, means all is okay."
*insert you dense mf meme here*20 -
Today at work, still laugh thinking back to it!
We were on lunch break but the linux support engineers who are on the phones as well have to pick up calls anyways (very small team).
*engineer walks to the table, sits down: Ahhh rest, finally!*
*tringggggggggg*
*engineer pulls a face like 'oh for fucks sake' and walks back to his desk*
*puts headphones on and clicks the answer button just as it disappears*
"really!?! Alright lets finally eat now"
*sits for literally one second*
*tringgggggggggg*
*Engineer seems quite pissed off now. walks to his desk again, puts on headset, clicks the answer button JUST as the call stops again*
"Mother of god, fucking really?"
*stays as his desk for a minute or so, walks back, stays hovering above his chair for a little and finally sits down again*
"Finall......"
*TRINGGGGGGGGGGGG*
"MOTHERFUCKER. THESE GUYS TIME IT OR SOMETHING!?!?"
*walks back to his desk very frustrated this time*
*puts on headphones very quickly and presses the answer button*
*answer works but the call is literally dropped the second he starts it (it was a real client)*
"OH FOR FUCKS FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING SAKE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK"
*walks back to table again and sits down. Takes sandwich and....*
*TRINGGGGGGGGGG MOTHERFUCKER*
"FUCKING COCKSUKING MOTHERFUCKING PIECES OF WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK EVER"
*gives a deadly look to another engineer: "I am NOT going to take it this time! En-fucking-joy."*
We laughed so hard xD16 -
Me: good day, how can I help you?
Client: *explains issue*
Me: alright, let's take a loo.... *AACHOOOO*
.
.
M: my apologies sir, that came out of nowhe... *ACHOOO*
M: do you have a second sir? My apologies!
C: sure man take your time 😁
*30 seconds later, nose seems to have calmed down*
M: back I am, apologies for the inconvenience!
C: no problem, it happens!
M: where was I?.... Right, I was going t...
*ACHOOOOOOOOOOO*
*ACHOOOOOOO*
AH... AH... AAAAH..... ACHOOOOO*
M: I'm very sorry, I'm going to put you through to a collegue!
*puts through to collegue*
*goes to bathroom*
.
.
*returns to desk*
*tringgggg*
Me: good afternoon sir, how may I hel... *A-MOTHERFUCKING-CHOOOOO* (thinking: oh for fucking fucks sake)
C: bless you!
M: thank you! Apologies, I seem to be having a snee.. *CHOOOOOOOO*
.
.
.
*sniffs a few times*
- zing attack.
*collegue yells at me to transfer my call*
*transfers call*
Me: thanks man, idk what's wrong with me hahah... *ACHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO*
OH FUCKING HELL 😠27 -
😎 = me, 💩 = client
💩: "I must emphasize that I'm on a tight schedule. I need this done in 2 weeks."
😎: I cut some features and take the job.
As agreed, I send a progress report at the end of the week to get feedback.
💩: *nothing*
😎: He must be busy... I'll call him if he doesn't reply in a few days.
💩: *doesn't answer call*
😎: Time running out, still no feedback, I assume everything is fine and finish it a day before the deadline. Suddenly:
💩: "Hi, how's the project going?"
😎: "...good... WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN???"
💩: "Oh, I went on a quick vacation"
😎: *wants to die a quick and painless death*
"There's only like a day left..."
💩: "Right... Soo, here's the feedback you asked for"
*dumps 4 paragraphs of stupid nitpicking on me (rants following)*
😎: *wants client to die a slow and painful death*14 -
Asshole trying to steal credit for my work. Can't wait for the next meeting to light this shit.
So this client hires me and this person that I'm gonna call 'B'. B deletes my name from the comments and description. Then proceeds to present it as his.
But B can't get it to run now, so they have me have a look at it. B thinks that I don't notice that he is trying to take credit for my shit. Now I'm sitting here with evidence for the next meeting with the client. Ignoring all of B's communications.54 -
Client : Hey make me five page website with blabalabla blabla blabla blablablablablabla that should be easy for you! for 10$?
me : for 10$ i can create a new folder and thats it and i am not gonna call it project i will name it asdaddaddadsas!15 -
Confessions of a Programmer
#1
If a client is an unbearable asshole during the initial communication, I look for every excuse to pad on the hours for the estimate to get paid more. If a client goes above and beyond in their douchbaggery, I tack on an additional $40/hour.
#2
Sometimes I will present an elaborate solution to a client, but really I'm just reading off the features of a plugin or library I'm going to download or buy after the call. Not because I can't build it myself, but because I'd rather spend more time on other/my own projects.
#3
Clients assume because I know one language, I know them all. Rather than turning down the work, I take a crash course to work in that language, or outsource the work and clean it up afterwards, whichever is more practical at the time.
#4
I use cPanel on a dedicated to manage our client websites. I'm not paid enough to bother with setting up everything manually.
#5
Certain projects I build have a 3-day backdoor built into it. If the client doesn't pay upon completion, a unique hash triggered as a GET variable deletes a core file in my work, rendering the work useless. If it wasn't triggered by the 4th day, the file allowing me to trigger this backdoor is removed. This is only used for clients where the project must be launched on their servers, or if there has been a previous issue collecting payment.
#6
I slip in the initial contract that all preceeding phone calls will be monitored and recorded, and that they acknowledge the recordings are admissable in court. This has saved me from losing money twice now.
#7
I have never used an IDE. (I know, I know, it's really inefficient and dumb, but I'm just more comfortable with Sublime. Plus I often find myself mobile and without my computer, so I have to program from my phone.)
#8
Each day resembles a betting spectacle of which work will be late, which will be rushed out and which will never see the light of day.
#9
I have used "sick" and "family emergency" as an excuse to just sleep in far more than I can count.
#10
When a client from hell crosses over the line in their conduct (such as getting very nasty and personal, or sending threats), I anonymously report them to the BBB and on RipOffReport.21 -
I had just started my new job and deleted 3 years of data that the client had spent over £450,000 collecting 😱
another developer used my PC to quickly access the clients database while I was out the room as I had sql management studio open. I went back to my PC thinking I was connected to my local database, did a few truncate tables to test my software and :0 minutes later I get a call asking why there was no data on the server!
Thank god for backups 😓7 -
[Thursday afternoon on a call...]
Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?
Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.
[Two hours later...]
Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?
Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.
Client: So when are you going to get it done?
Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.
Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.
Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.
By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.
If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.
I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.
Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.
I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.
[Next morning...]
Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.
-----
Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.7 -
This is an old rant from over 10 years ago in my first job at 19. I was tasked with turning off one of our clients email because they had left the company. Easy enough, logged into cPanel, job done. Later that day I get a phone call from the clients company asking if there was a problem with the email. No I said, everything should be fine, I did remove a 'joe.bloggs@blah.com' email address as instructed because... *reading job bag*... they had left the company. The client then said, that's my email you've turned off and hung up. Turned out he had been fired and no one told him. I felt horrible. I will always remember that conversation 😓8
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Client: Can you provide some kind of guaranteed timeline that you're going to be able to move our website to our new servers with the optimizations implemented? I know you said it should take a week, but we have 3 weeks to get this moved over and we cannot afford to be double billed. I'm waiting to fire up the new server until you can confirm.
Me: As I said, it SHOULD take about a week, but that's factoring in ONLY the modifications being made for optimization and a QA call to review the website. This does not account for your hosting provider needing to spin up a new server.
We also never offered to move your website over to said new server. I sent detailed instructions for your provider to move a copy of the entire website over and have it configured and ready to point your domain over to, in order to save time and money since your provider won't give us the access necessary to perform a server-to-server transfer. If you are implying that I need to move the website over myself, you will be billed for that migration, however long it takes.
Client: So you're telling me that we paid $950 for 10 hours of work and that DOESN'T include making the changes live?
Me: Why would you think that the 10 hours that we're logged for the process of optimizing your website include additional time that has not been measured? When you build out a custom product for a customer, do you eat the shipping charges to deliver it? That is a rhetorical question of course, because I know you charge for shipping as well. My point is that we charge for delivery just as you do, because it requires our time and manpower.
All of this could have been avoided, but you are the one that enforced the strict requirement that we cannot take the website down for even 1 hour during off-peak times to incorporate the changes we made on our testbed, so we're having to go through this circus in order to deliver the work we performed.
I'm not going to give you a guarantee of any kind because there are too many factors that are not within our control, and we're not going to trap ourselves so you have a scapegoat to throw under the bus if your boss looks to you for accountability. I will reiterate that we estimate it would take about a week to implement, test and run through a full QA together, as we have other clients within our queue and our time must be appropriately blocked out each day. However, the longer you take to pull the trigger on this new server, the longer it will take on my end to get the work scheduled within the queue.
Client: If we get double billed, we're taking that out of what we have remaining to pay you.
Me: On the subject of paying us, you signed a contract acknowledging that you would pay us the remaining 50% after you approved the changes, which you did last week, in order for us to deliver the project. Thank you for the reminder that your remaining balance has not yet been paid. I'll have our CFO resend the invoice for you to remit payment before we proceed any further.
---
I love it when clients give me shit. I just give it right back.6 -
First thing this morning I heard my boss had taken some PSDs to a client today. I thought it was a bit weird because he doesn't have a laptop. Midday I got a call to say all my PSDs were corrupted:
"I'm with the client now. We're very unhappy, we can't get your files to open."
"Oh, right. They should be fine. What version of Photoshop are you using?"
"The latest."
"Okay, what's the error?"
"There isn't one."
"Okay, so it's freezing?"
"No, we can't see the files at all."
"Which laptop are you using?"
"The Nexus."
"The what?"
"That tablet thing."
So after about 20 minutes we figured out he's copied the PSDs and a shortcut to Photoshop on to a USB stick. Then plugged the USB into a USB to micro USB cable and stuck that in an Android Nexus. Expecting to open Photoshop.exe and the PSDs.
I don't mind people being confused with technology but when it's your own boss, who doesn't even bother to let you know anything, then phones up and tells you off you just want to strangle him.15 -
Had this recently with a client, mysql server of one of our shared hosting servers went down:
Senior engineer 1: heads up guys, mysql of {server name} is down, working on it! *calls second engineer in*
Support people: thanks for letting know! (in case clients call about it)
*triiiingggg*
Me: good afternoon, how can I help you?
Client: this site which we manage for a shared customer says it can't connect to the database...
M: is it hosted on {server name of mysql problems}
C: yes.
M: there's a mysql disruption there right now, we're working on it!
C: *starts guilt tripping me about thy they chose us for stability reasons and now this happens*
M: sir, I can't change this situation so you can go on and on about that but it's not going to help anyone.
C: okay, so what can I tell my client?
M: you can tell that we have a mysql server disruption right now and are working to fix it as soon as possible!
C: and what am I going to tell my client if they don't accept that answer?
M: you can tell that we are fixing this disruption as soon as possible.
C: yes you said that but what if they don't accept that answer, what am I going to tell them THEN?!
M: Listen, sir. We have a disruption right now. It's not fun but whether I tell this by writing it to you in a fairy tail or shout it at you, it's not going to make a difference.
We have a disruption and we are working on i....
*click*
Well, fuck you too.7 -
Something that I'm utterly ashamed of.
Had to add text message and call communication functionality in one of the products.
Boss shrunk the deadline to two days ETA.
Didn't know jackshit about twilio.
Meeting with client:
Client - So the communication thing is done right?
Me - Yyeahhh
Client - Let's try it then. *Calls himself*
Me - *Calls the API directly from my phone*
Client got out happy. Nobody knows what actually happened there. I didn't even talk to my colleagues about this. Boss gave me bonus to pull of the impossible. I added the feature after a week of the incident.8 -
*on the phone with a client*
Important detail: in Dutch we call a colon a "double point" and a semicolon a "point comma".
Me: go to {url} and put double point followed by {something} behind it.
Client: *tries for 5 minutes, suggestions forth and back*
Me: how did you type the double points?
Client: I typed two points. (..)
The level of retardness I thought existed got worse once again.
At that moment the open window seemed like a veeery good option 😭15 -
School principal : P / Me : M / Interviewer over Skype : S
P. I recently heard you run a software club in our school.
M. Yes. (started from March)
P. Well, one software community seems that he found you somewhere, and asked me if we can do a quick interview.
M. Sure. What is it?
P. So he will connect to skype.
M. Let's start then...
*A few moments later...*
M. Wwwwhhhhaaaaattttttt?
P. Calm down! What's the problem?
M. How can I have more than 5 years of android development?
S. Ok. Recorded. Next question.
M. (uhhh)
*A few moments later...*
M. What? Why in the heck do I use subversion?........
Yes... Ah... Ummm....
No! Why should i make a gui client for subversion?
*A few moments later...*
S. Do you have hacking experience?
M. Of what? I know hacking is illegal here..
S. Like... Anything!
M. Do YOU have an experience?
S. Yup.
M. What?
S. Google.
M. How?
S. (silence) Ok. Let's move on.
M. (wtf is this guy)
*A few moments later...*
S. Okay. We were about to hire you but you didnt met our job requirements.
M. ......What? What was the job?
S. Web developer Intern
M. I got no questions regarding "web".
S. I know devs should be great at all things.
M. Shut the hell up. What company are you?
S. (says something)
M. (Searches in google) Doesnt come in search results.
S. Where did you searched it? (trembling voice)
M. (Searches in naver, search engine of korea) Nothing. Are you sure you are a company?
S. (ends call)
Hate these fake interviews. And i have no idea how they found my school
I never wrote my school anywhere.12 -
Client(On Call): I emailed some query a day before. I got a response too. But, i am not able to find answer of my specific query.
Me: Let me check that for you. Yes, it is there. See the mail carefully.
Client: No. It's not there.
Me: Can you read the whole mail for me?
Client: Sure. *Started Reading* Oh yes. Yes. it is here. *Hangs up the Phone.*
Me: Sigh.5 -
Today I got to my new office. After booting my PC I noticed, that my phone-client isn't working.
I wrote an Incident to our helpline, telling them my phone isn't working.
After one hour I got an mail:
"Dear XYZ, we couldn't reach you at your phone. Please call back so we can fix your issue"
FUCK YOU WTF! ARE YOU GUYS RETARDED? READ YOUR FUCKING INCIDENTS! MOTHERFUCKING CUNTS!
11 -
In my previous company, I used to work for a client company which had a terrible website. It was about financial data and people would have to wait too long before the page loaded because there was a freaking 1.2 megs of minified, compressed JS file that needed to load before you could do anything.
Everyone knew that was a pain in the ass and nobody wanted to touch spaghetti code and mess up something they didn't know.
I wanted to however take a shot at it. So an architect from client side and I discussed how we were gonna go about it and how we were gonna find the stuff that needed to load on page load and stuff that could be loaded later.
So we plan for it. We broke everything down from a globals polluting JS, found out the variables and functions that needed to run during first load by literally putting a console statement for each function and finally came up with two bundles.
The primary bundle was 120kb and would during first load and then every module would call it's own secondary bundle when the user interacted with it.
In the process, we removed half a meg of JS and the site became blazing fast.
I did it with a team of two members who, my manager thought were useless, learned a ton of stuff, setup proper process for the transition.
When the client didn't appreciate the amount of brain and effort we had put into it, these two members came forward to tell the client to acknowledge my effort and attributed the success of it to me.
I was totally moved. There was so much respect that I didnt care what anybody else thought. I was just so happy to work with those two humans.
When i left the company, i gifted them stuff they always talked about or wanted. :) Feels good.2 -
Deadline was 2 days ago.. Managment pissed off, bugging me every 2 minutes, until they get a call from the client asking to leave me alone to do my job. Awesome feeling..
5 -
One of our clients deploy their own server app. So this happened after a prod deployment. (4am)
*Cellphone rings while sleeping*
Client : we need you on the conference call now. URGENT!
*Gets on conference call*
*Client explain the problem*
*Explaining to the client that the problem is in their side (https connection not working, either network or certificate problem)*
*Client doesn't believe it and pushes me for a fix that I have no control on*
*4 hours later in a heated conversation*
Client : ok problem is on our side. We used our SSL certificate from staging with production and thought it would work.
Me :
5 -
The Orange Juice Saga ....
I've just come off one of the stupidest calls ever.
Firstly, I am not in tech support, I'm a software developer - read the below with this in mind.
My client called up to say the system I created as been compromised. When he attempts to login, he is logged off his Windows machine.
He'd also apparently taken his PC to ***insert large UK computer superstore here***, who took £100 plus to look at the machine and conclude his needs to buy a new PC.
I remoted into his computer to see WTF was going on.
As he described, visiting my login form did log you out. In fact, whenever you pressed the "L" key you were logged out. Press the "M" key, all windows were minimized. Basically, all Windows hotkeys appeared to be active, without the need to press the Windows key.
Whilst connected to his PC I spent a good 30 minutes checking keyboard settings and came up short.
After asking all the normal questions (has anything changed on your PC, have you installed stuff lately etc.) without any useful answers I got nothing.
I then came across an article stating several presses of the Windows in quick succession will solve the issue.
I got the client to try this, pressed the "L" key (which would have logged me off previously) and the issue was resolved.
Basically, the Windows key was "stuck", which oddly makes your PC kind of useless.
I asked the client if they'd split anything on the keyword whilst working. His exact word were simply lol:
"Oh yer, yesterday, I was trying to drink a glass of orange quickly and split some in the corner of keyboard. I did clean it up quickly though".
Yep, the issue was due to the client spilling orange juice on their keyboard , which in turn made the Windows key stick.
Disaster averted.
A call that started with the client stating I made a system that was easily compromised (i.e. my fault), morphed into a sorry saga of cold drinks.
The client did ask why the ***superstore name*** charged him money for that and recommended a new machine. That is a good question and demonstrated some the questionable tech support practices we see nowadays, even at very large stores.
To be fair to the client, he told me to bill him for half a days work as it was his own fault.
When I'm able to stop myself involuntarily face palming, I'm off for a swim to unwind :)
7 -
Fuck stupid client.
Sorry:
Boss: client want to white label the solution.
Me: ok. They just need to create A record and send as SSL certificate and I will do it.
Client : here is your SSL certificate.
Me: spend whole night to make the transfer and setup server and check whole solutions one by one for reference to our company.
Next day wake around 2 pm to 100 whatsapp message, call from client and noss.
Turns out client IT team revoked the certificate without informing and the product stop working for all people.
Me: go to back to sleep.6 -
We had the most fucking retarded client today. No, seriously, if you ever beat their level you have a serious mental issue.
They had a mail problem for which they'd need to check at the side of another company since we don't have those fucking logs.
Their statements:
- they entered an email address In the text field of mail-tester.com and were furious that they didn't get the results sent.
Note: it says right on that page that YOU JUST NEED TO SEND THE EMAIL ADDRESS WHICH IS PRE-ENTRRED IN THAT TEXT FIELD AN EMAIL.
- their company has been a reputable 'conservative' company which hasn't done anything wrong since 19xx so the fact that they'd end up on a blacklist was FUCKING OUTRAGEOUS and bullshit.
- our support wasn't willing to help and only willing to tell them outrageous lies.
- the other it company was only reachable at a premium number and thus expensive to call.
Emails back and forth and finally they CC'd the other company. They're reply was fucking priceless:
"we never had a premium number. Feel free to call us on *number* any time during the week between *time* and *time*.
Then he told us that we should just go back to sleep.
It was way worse than that but due to privacy and my own memory this is all I can tell.
Just wow.3 -
Client: can we have a quick call right now?
Me: sure, hold on while I install VirtualBox, Windows 10 and Skype for Business13 -
I'm sure most PHP peeps have come across the "Faker" library, which generates a plethora of random content for you.
Let this be a warning to you.
Today I used their "realText()" (see: https://github.com/fzaninotto/...) method when seeding a database for a client, which, oddly enough, generates text using real words.
The client wasn't too impressed and asked me why I would type in "So she began nursing her fat again" as a sample Faq. It required an email and call to the client to explain it was all auto generated text and I didn't type anything myself.
Should probably just use their basic lipsum text methods next to generate some gibberish :)
3 -
Client said: "And you promise there won't be any caterpillars in the app...",I gave him a strange look, he continued: "or how do you call that mistakes in apps".
He meant bugs...4 -
'lashed out' to a client for the first time yesterday.
Clients have the habit to call after tickets and while its annoying, it's manageable if it happens *sometimes*
It was happening the entire fucking morning and when a client called for an update about a ticket for the second time, I couldn't help but sound frustrated.
"how far are you with the ticket?"
"i have other things to do as well, you know, you're not the only customer i have to help right now"
"i understand, do you possibly have an eta?"
"no. You're next in line, is that clear enough?"
"okay" *hangs up*
*crap*
He e-mailed me afterwards apologizing, that was nice.
I'm sorry sir 😥 nothing personal but it can become so fucking annoying sometimes.4 -
Dev: “Ughh..look at this –bleep- code! When I execute the service call, it returns null, but the service received a database error.”
Me: “Yea, that service was written during a time when the mentality was ‘Why return a service error if the client can’t do anything about it?’”
Dev: “I would say that’s a misunderstanding of that philosophy.”
Me: “I would say it’s a perfectly executed example of a deeply flawed philosophy.”
Dev: “No, the service should just return something that tells the client the operation failed.”
Me: “They did. It was supposed to return a valid result, and the developer indicated a null response means the operation failed. How you deal with the null response is up to you.”
Dev: “That is stupid. How am I supposed to know a null response means the operation failed?”
Me: “OK, how did you know the operation failed?”
Dev: “I had to look at the service error logs.”
Me: “Bingo.”
Dev: “This whole service is just a –bleep-ing mess. There are so many things that can go wrong and the only thing the service returns is null when the service raises an exception.”
Me: “OK, what should the service return?”
Dev: ”I don’t know. Error 500 would be nice.”
Me: “Would you know what to do with error 500?”
Dev: ”Yea, I would look at the error log”
Me: “Just like you did when the service returned null?”
<couple of seconds of silence>
Dev: “I don’t know, it’s a –bleep-ing mess.”
Me: “You’re in the code, change it.”
Dev: “Ooohhh no, not me. The whole thing will have to be re-written. It should have been done correctly the first time. If we had time to do code reviews, I would have caught this –bleep- before the service was deployed.”
Me: “Um, you did.”
<a shocked look from Dev>
Dev: “What…no, I’ve never seen this code.”
Me: “I sat next to Chuck when you were telling him he needed to change the service to return null if an exception was raised. I remember you telling him specifically to pop-up an error dialog ‘Service request failed’ to the user when the service returned null.”
Dev: “I don’t remember any of that.”
Me: “Well, Chuck did. He even put it in the check-in comments. See…”
<check in comments stated Dev’s code review and dictated the service return null on exceptions>
Dev: “Hmm…I guess I did. –bleep- are you a –bleep-ing elephant? You –bleep-ing remember everything.”
<what I wanted to say>
No, I don’t remember everything, but I remember all the drive-by <bleep>-ed up coding philosophies you tried to push to the interns and we’re now having all kinds of problems I spend waaaaay too much time fixing.
<what I said, and lied a little bit>
Me: “No, I was helping Nancy last week troubleshoot the client application last week with the pop-up error. Since the service returned a null, she didn’t know where to begin to look for the actual error.”
Dev: “Oh.”1 -
!Story
The day I became the 400 pound Chinese hacker 4chan.
I built this front-end solution for a client (but behind a back end login), and we get on the line with some fancy European team who will handle penetration testing for the client as we are nearing dev completion.
They seem... pretty confident in themselves, and pretty disrespectful to the LAMP environment, and make the client worry even though it's behind a login the project is still vulnerable. No idea why the client hired an uppity .NET house to test a LAMP app. I don't even bother asking these questions anymore...
And worse, they insist we allow them to scrape for vulnerabilities BEHIND the server side login. As though a user was already compromised.
So, I know I want to fuck with them. and I sit around and smoke some weed and just let this issue marinate around in my crazy ass brain for a bit. Trying to think of a way I can obfuscate all this localStorage and what it's doing... And then, inspiration strikes.
I know this library for compressing JSON. I only use it when localStorage space gets tight, and this project was only storing a few k to localStorage... so compression was unnecessary, but what the hell. Problem: it would be obvious from exposed source that it was being called.
After a little more thought, I decide to override the addslashes and stripslashes functions and to do the compression/decompression from within those overrides.
I then minify the whole thing and stash it in the minified jquery file.
So, what LOOKS from exposed client side code to be a simple addslashes ends up compressing the JSON before putting it in localStorage. And what LOOKS like a stripslashes decompresses.
Now, the compression does some bit math that frankly is over my head, but the practical result is if you output the data compressed, it looks like mandarin and random characters. As a result, everything that can be seen in dev tools looks like the image.
So we GIVE the penetration team login credentials... they log in and start trying to crack it.
I sit and wait. Grinning as fuck.
Not even an hour goes by and they call an emergency meeting. I can barely contain laughter.
We get my PM and me and then several guys from their team on the line. They share screen and show the dev tools.
"We think you may have been compromised by a Chinese hacker!"
I mute and then die my ass off. Holy shit this is maybe the best thing I've ever done.
My PM, who has seen me use the JSON compression technique before and knows exactly whats up starts telling them about it so they don't freak out. And finally I unmute and manage a, "Guys... I'm standing right here." between gasped laughter.
If only it was more common to use video in these calls because I WISH I could have seen their faces.
Anyway, they calmed their attitude down, we told them how to decompress the localStorage, and then they still didn't find jack shit because i'm a fucking badass and even after we gave them keys to the login and gave them keys to my secret localStorage it only led to AWS Cognito protected async calls.
Anyway, that's the story of how I became a "Chinese hacker" and made a room full of penetration testers look like morons with a (reasonably) simple JS trick.
9 -
Working in the IT Department is just funny man. Sometimes I wonder if I'm dumb, too smart to answer these dumb questions or these clients are just asking questions they already have answers to that I don't.
Client: Hey, can you please give X access to Y's Dropbox? He gets error saying he doesn't have access to the file.
Me: Uhh, you have to share a link to the specific file you want to share with X. Then only he can access it.
Client: Can you send him the link?
Me: Uhhhh, what link?
Client: The link to the file.
Me: Who created the file you want to share?
Client: My boss did. And he wants me to send the link to X. But I don't have the link so he said to check with IT.
Me (in my mind): WTF!!!!
Me: Ok, ask your boss to share the link to the file he created with you then you can send it to Y. He can also send it to Y directly himself. IT doesn't have and has no idea of what file your boss created. Only your boss knows.
Client: Ok, hold on let me check with him..
Client gets back on the phone.. "he said he deleted the file".
Me: Well, there's no file to share here.
Client: Can you find it?
Me: Call Dropbox.
Client: do you have his number?
Me: Who?
Client: Dropbox..
At this point I started laughing.. 😂😂😂🤣🤣
Me: Dropbox is a company.
Client: Ok, thank you. I'll call Dropbox.
At this point, I'm wondering. If this client thought Dropbox was person, then what did she mean by her initial question? 🤔
Can this be real life? This happened less than an hour ago, and going home now still confused about this whole situation. 😂😂5 -
38°C, sunday afternoon, client be like: "Omg, I need you, it's important, can you call me?"
*calls client*
"So I got this E-Mail that said my SEO could be improved alot, why didn't you do that"
*looks at auto generated spam mail, hangs up*6 -
!dev I'd just helped a client cut over to a new fiber connection and then left for Vegas, about 2 days into the trip my wife and I decided to hit a breakfast spot that had bottomless mimosa's, which was of course a claim we had to test.
As we are walking(stumbling) out of the restaurant I get a call that the connection has crashed and the entire car dealership is unable to sell cars, which they tell me is important functionality.
So I make it up to my room and break out the laptop, luckily the mgmt interfaces are still available externally so I'm able to log in and then have the fun challenge of 1) not falling off of my chair 2) not accidentally making a change that kills what connection I have in and 3) fixing their actual issue.
Took me almost an hour to find a simple OSPF issue but at least got them working and happy. However by that time I was beginning to sober up, which is the absolute worst thing that can happen while day-drinking and ended up basically causing me to be be hung-over for the rest of the night, including my wifes friends wedding, which she wasn't thrilled about...
The moral of this story is to make sure to NOT stop drinking while dealing with unexpected production impacting events.1 -
Story time!
A little over a year ago I was in the hiring process with a new company and countered their initial offer. I was told by the CTO that it was no problem and they would get back to me soon.
A couple days go by and I'm then informed that they're hiring a new IT director and would like me to interview with him as well. It felt kinda lame since I'd already been offered the job but I rolled with it.
When I showed up to the office for an interview I tried to call and let them know I was there and couldn't get a hold of anyone. 30 minutes later I get a call from the CTO saying they couldn't find the new IT director and when they got him to answer the phone he said he had left early and would call me to do a phone interview.
Obviously the whole experience so far has been pretty lame but I stuck with it because I knew the CTO personally. I did the phone interview and quickly realized this dude was a prick, and would be a terrible boss, but I spoke with the CTO again who told me to stick with it and eventually I did get the job.
Fast forward about a month and it's clear the new director is trash. He literally bragged about firing a dude over an accidental outage (wtf!?).
He had the technical experience you'd expect of a junior help desk and his management skills were pretty clearly sub-par.
He was also, for whatever reason, completely unable to communicate with the only woman on our team. When assigning work he would always feel the need to ask if she could 'handle it' rather than just assigning it to her like it's done for everyone else. He was pretty clearly sexist.
The whole team hates this dude by this point but he's somehow managed to woo the executives into thinking he shits gold.
I was helping him set up a Python venv on his machine when I noticed another VPN client installed which certainly piqued my interest. After a bit of digging it was clear he was using company time and company equipment to continue working for his previous employer.
We turned over logs and he was fired the next day. He tried to add me on LinkedIn afterwards and I have never declined something quicker.
Moral of the story is don't be a dickhead.1 -
Client: When will you give me an update on this feature
Me: In two weeks
Client: okay that’s fine
Client proceeds to call me everyday asking me for an update🤨🤨
Fuck you sir.4 -
My boss asked me to do tech support today as one of tech support employee was not feeling well.
The very first call i attended, went like:
Me : Sir, this is xyz support desk. How may i help you?
*Listening his problem*
Me : Sir solution is pretty simple. Just do a Right click on application shortcut icon and then select "Open File Location".
Client : where can i find "Right Click"?2 -
So, my wife is in the hospital with two of the kids for an annual checkup. Should be nothing to worry about but still it's stressful and I want to be there.
I'd booked the day off (until the end of the week) and last week I got told, you've taken too many holidays, just the Friday is approved.
Ok, fine, I'll do some extra hours work from home and be there for the appointment. But fuck no, they schedule an "important" client meeting this morning and I'm required to attend.
TWO FUCKING HOURS and I contributed a sum total of 2 sentences which could have been filled in just as well by the other developer on the call
Just another reason I'm happy to be interviewing at other companies.6 -
How do you call it when production breaks and a programmer has find out what went wrong/fix it as soon as possible while the client is breathing down their neck?
He's going through a rough patch.12 -
Once I had to do a 'hands on' pair programming session for a position I applied for... Together with the lead dev we would switch coding every 15 minutes It was somewhat of a horror story...
The assignment was to implement an password reset flow, connecting it to the api and then handling the entire password reset flow, in Angular becahs ye know has to be Angular...
After drafting the ui and setting up the click events, I wanted to hookup the api calls, but then it was time to switch around...
The fucktard dev first started to adjust my classmappings to be more in line with his preference, without touching the css classnames... Ok... Micro managing ... Check...
So after breaking the styles, he wrote the fetches to the api endpoints and that was his 15 minutes of shame...
I continued only to find out the endpoints we were using had errors in them and would not return anything workable...
The dev said he'd tested the endpoint before and it worked, but clearly it didn't...
After about an hour of going back and forth trying to get this to work he got a call from a client because server was down (surprise), he excused himself and had to prioritize on this, running out and leaving me there for the remaining morning ...
I just sat there waiting for the HR checkout talk, only to lean towards rejecting the position...
Fucking waste of time, and in the end the feedback was they doubted MY TECHNICAL SKILLS ... And wouldn't make me an offer 😂👍 nice story bro...
K THX BAI!7 -
I am about to fire this client.
I can't take any more of this abject fucking stupidity.
I can't take any more sentence fragment responses to detailed questions and thorough responses.
I can't take any more expectations that I deliver consistent metadata and hundreds of pages of documentation, yet no one else has to do the same
I can't take any more rules only applying to/hamstringing me and my team
I can't take any more fucking gross incompetence and grossly undereducated shitfucks that get to send ridiculous bills and have 0 accountability while playing developer
I can't take any more obviously nepotistic and racist hiring that walks back every step of progress we've made in the last 50 years
I can't take not being able to call a spade a spade and being the villain when there's obvious graft occuring at every level
I can't take these old fucks padding their retirements while rendering everyone else contractors and cutting off opportunity for future generations
I can't take how absurdly, blisteringly stupid the business people are, or the fact that one average project managers with a recent PMI cert somehow bills what I do
I'm 100% going to drop dime on these fucks to every regulatory body they are beholden to, their investors, their corporate owners and USCIS, since I've already doxxed the shit out of all of my coworkers that don't remotely qualify for the positions they occupy.5 -
Android and Full Stack dev here. Also first post.
No boss, i won't call that client to tell him how to configure ssl for his Outlook.10 -
When you get a client from real MOTHERFUCKING hell.
You just really FUCKING want to say this:
Scorched earth MOTHERFUCKER. I will massacre you. Now SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LET ME DO MY JOB.
First, take a big step back and literally, FUCK YOUR OWN FACE.
I will rain down an ungodly FUCKING firestorm upon you.
You're gonna have to call the FUCKING United Nations and get a FUCKING BINDING RESOLUTION to keep me from FUCKING destroying you.
I am talking SCORCHED EARTH MOTHERFUCKER.
I will MASSACRE you.
I WILL FUCK YOU UP!
But for your own sake you keep it at this:
Yes sir/ma'am :).7 -
"Your every second word is 'fuck', you really should watch out for that."
Fucking give me a fucking client who doesnt fucking call me at 6am fucking saturday and ill fucking stop swearing.4 -
Let's see here, we have:
🤡 Creepy Cackle Guy: watches videos all day and cackles like a hyena, plus constantly farts, and complains a lot. He gets everyone gassed up, no pun intended.
😤Bitchy PM: argues with you about every little thing, lies to pad her metrics while screwing the dev's metrics over. Also lies about what clients say to force launch or what she feels client should do. Rude to clients & co-workers. Runs and tattles to higher ups when people call her out on her shit. Nobody can stand her, she get's the entire office upset.
🙉Darth Vader: I don't think this one needs explaining. He breathes SO freaking loud you can hear it across the room. He also won't talk to anybody. Ever.
🤐The Non-Stop Flapper: nice person, but chats you non stop about their mundane life events, even when your status is set to busy or they know you're swamped. Asks irrelevant questions all day, every day. Heart of gold but needs to reel in the chatting.
🤬 Mr.Rage: whines about EVERYTHING. I mean everything. Has also thrown his food on me once over a joke about pizza. Wants to move up to programming but cant program.
---
So between them all, I scream on the inside daily. 🙊😫😢13 -
I'm going for longest rant. TL:DR; version here:
http://pastebin.com/0Bp4jX9y
then:
http://pastebin.com/FfUiTzsh
Twat Client,
As per our conversation, here is an invoice for the work you requested on behalf of U.S. Bloom. I realize that you ended up going with another designer, but you did request samples of what my take on the logo design would be. The following line item is indicative of 1 hour of graphic design consultation as per your request via Skype.
As I recall, you mentioned that this is not how Upwork "works" but considering it was you who requested that I converse with you via Skype instead of via the Upwork messenger, and since there were no clear instructions on how to proceed with Upwork after our initial consultation, It is assumed that you were foregoing Upwork altogether to work with me directly, thus the invoice from me directly for my time involved in the project. I would have reached out to you via Skype, but it seems that you may have severed our connection there.
After spending a little time researching your company, I could not find current information for Basic Media Marketing, but I was able to reach out to your former partner Not A. Twat, who was more than helpful and suggested that he would encourage you to pay for the services rendered.
It is discouraging that you asked for my help and I delivered, but when I ask for compensation in return for my skills, you refused to pay and have now taken your site offline and removed me as a contact from Skype.
{[CLIENT of CLIENT]},
I am sorry that I have bothered you with this email. I copied you on it merely for transparency's sake. I am sure that your logo is great and I am sure whatever decision was made is awesome for your decision. I just wanted to make sure that you weren't getting "samples" of other people's work passed off as original work by Twat Media Marketing.
I can't speak for any of the other candidates, but since Twat asked me to conduct work with him via Skype rather than through Upwork, and since he's pretty much a ghost online now, (Site Offline, LinkedIn Removed or Blocked, and now Skype blocked as well) one has to think this was a hit and run to either crowdsource your logo inexpensively or pass off other artist's work as his own. That may not be the case, but from my perspective all signs are pointing to that scenario.
Here is a transcript. Some of his messages have been redacted.
As you can clearly see, requests and edits to the logo were being made from Jon to me, but he thinks it's a joke when I ask about invoicing and tries to pass it off as an interview. Do you see any interview questions in there? There were no questions about how long I have been designing, what are my rates, who have I done work for in the past, or examples of my previous work. There were none because he didn't need them at this point.
He'd already seen my proposal and my Behance.net portfolio as well as my rates on Upwork.com. This was a cut to the chase request for my ideas for your logo. It was not just ideas, but mock designs with criticism and approval awaiting. Not only that, but I only asked for an hour of compensation. After looking at the timestamps on our conversation, you can clearly see that I spent at least 3 hours corresponding with Twat on this project. That's three hours of work I could have spent on an honest paying customer.
I trust that TWATCLIENT will do the right thing. I just wanted you guys to know that I was in it to do the best design I could for you. I didn't know I was in it to waste three hours of my life in an "interview" I wasn't aware I was participating in.
Reply from ClientClient:
Hello Sir,
This message is very confusing?
We do not owe your company any money and have never worked with you before.
Therefore, I am going to disregard that invoice.
Reply from TWATCLIENT's boss via phone:
I have two problems with this. One I don't think your business practices are ethical, especially calling MY client directly and sending them an invoice.
Two why didn't you call or email Jon before copying my client on the email invoice?
Me: Probably because he's purposely avoiding me and I had no way to find him. I only got his email address today and that was from a WHOIS lookup.
Really, you don't think my business practices are ethical? What about slavery? Is that ethical? Is it ethical to pass of my designs to your client for critique, but not pay me for doing them?
... I'LL HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK!
My email follow up:
http://pastebin.com/hMYPGtxV
I got paid. The power of CCing the right combination of people is greater than most things on Earth.14 -
Lord forgive me for laughing too hard at this person/situation... I kid you NOT!
So today while everything was going well, we suddenly had network issues at work. We worked to get everything back up online asap and then sent out an email for those affected to either restart their machines or refresh their desktops but we recommend restarting... After some few client calls, this special call came in..
Riiing, riiiiiing, ring....
Me: hi, how can help you?
Client: *laughing.. This is probably a stupid question but I forgot how to "refresh" my desk top..the thing is, I have Febreeze but I don't think that's for desk tops.
Me: Wait, what? 🤔 Febreeze for what?😕
Client: You guys sent an email to refresh our desk tops and I said I have Febreeze so how will that get my things in the computer back to show again?
Me: Ohhh, no no. We meant your computer desktop. You don't need Febreeze. Right click anywhere on your computer in the screen and select refresh from the pop up menu. We meant your computer "desktop" not your actual "desk top".
Client: *starts laughing...I told you it was a stupid question
Me: don't worry.. It wasn't stupid.
After I hang up, some of my team members asked me why someone is asking about Febreeze...I told them and they all started laughing hysterically
I was still trying to digest the conversation I had just have on the phone. 😂😂😂12 -
That feeling when the company looses a 120k account and it is blamed on your expert opinion and poor handling off the situation when It's really the fuckwits in sales who in their greed for provisions make shitty pitches.
I got a call to attend a meeting with a customer. Present was also the "developer" from the customers side who was to oversee the projects. The pitch was made earlier, but no information was provided beforehand so I was going in blind, covering for a suddenly absent lead. The point was to roughly present how the project was to be executed and I was told to voice my opinion on development time estimate that the clients expert had given. They were outsourcing and had already fired their whole team.
I gave a number based on the provided information and all hell breaks loose. Suddenly it's a total circle jerk. Shit goes down. The "dev" tells that he can do it himself in half the time and starts showing some shitExcelsOfTotalAbsurdness that prove it. I calculate his claim and end up with a result that he has 60+ hours in his day, so I ask why doesn't he do it then? Why the outsourcing if they could just give him a raise and save a ton of cash.. sudden silence and you just can hear the rusty gears turn while they try to make a new excuse.
Well it went south. Today I found out that the client was our sales guys buddy. so TL;DR of it was that our sales guy was trying to make a quick buck and give a break to his buddy and hang the shitbucket on our team. I pointed out that this was a shitty business deal that would go into the red, but the sales guy turned it around and now "I cost company 120k/month account on a long project" and because I acted unprofessionally customer is unhappy.
I FUCKING HATE THIS SHIT
secretly hoping to get fired over this10 -
Conversation between me (intern) and a guy from communications, let's call him Bob.
Bob: "Hey, client X wants these pages to be changed."
Me: "Again? Last time I changed them was less than a week ago!"
Bob: "Yeah, everyone thinks X is a pain in the ass, but hey, more money for us."
Me: "But you don't pay me..."
Bob: "Oh yeah, you're right haha XD."
Me: "Haha... :')"2 -
So today was shite. I get done with classes for today after going to work in the morning( college student) and I get a phone call. SURPRISE! We have a client meeting in twenty minutes.
My class runs from 5-9 and the meeting was scheduled at 7:30. I was let out early thank god. Then made sure that we had deliverables for the project running and ready to go.
Meeting with the client went well and he was pleased with my progress.
Now I have been the only one developing any sort of deliverable for this website. It originally started out with three people. The main developer will call him Cunt and a front-end dev that isn't on the project anymore.
FUCKING CUNT DECIDED TO COME AT ME FOR SAYING THAT THERE WAS A MISCOMMUNICATION ERROR AND ONE OF THE TASKS WASNT FINISHED. THEN CUNT ASKED IF I HAD ALL OF THE FRONT DEVS PAGES TO WHICH I SIGHED YES. CUNT FUCKFACE PROCEEDED TO EDUCATE ME ON HOW TO TALK TO OTHER DEVS AND NOT MAKE CRITICIZE HER CODE. UM CUNT YOU HAVENT COMMUNICATED WITH HER FOR THE THREE MONTHS IVE BEEN ON THIS PROJECT. AND YOUVE CONSTANTLY AVOIDED BEING IN THE OFFICE WHEN ANYONE IS PRESENT AND EVEN SHOOED HER AWAY. THE FACT THAT CUNT ISNT FIRED IS BECAUSE I TOOK LEAD ON HIS PROJECT AND HAVE MAKING EVERY DEADLINE FOR THIS AND OTHER PROJECTS.
*breaths*
Moral of this. Don't be a CUNT!2 -
I got a call at 12:30 one night a few months back. Apparently some back-end scripts I edited to fix an automated test setup crashed around 75 test pc's and halted somewhere around 2000 tests. I quickly jumped on, fixed the issue, and got everything back online.
I was up all night certain I would get fired. First thing in the morning the client says welcome to the club some, of the best have done the same thing.2 -
I'm so grateful DevOps is now a thing. I remember getting a phone call from a client at 2am on a Friday because their site was down and having to ssh in from a Nokia with the world's tiniest keyboard to reboot the server.
Of course that particular server only exposed port 22 on it's local network, so I had to first ssh into another server which did have its ssh port open to external connections.
Trying to remember two sets of credentials and type them in on a tiny keyboard, while so drunk you were seeing double, standing outside in the rain as it was the only place you got signal. Yeah…I'm so grateful DevOps is now a thing
7 -
Client : can you add a calling feature to our android app?
Me : Ok.
*** after updating the app ****
Client : what is this **** dialog (calling permission request for android)!
Users are complaining about it and refuse to use the app!!! Don't you know I can get into legal problems with this???
Me :But you just asked for this feature?
Client : I want this feature but remove the dialog.
Me : you can't that's not how google works.
Client : I don't care do something remove the dialog or edit it but keep the feature.
Me : 😑😑😑😑 nvm I'll figure out something.
Ended up with copying the number to the dial screen instead of direct call from the app.7 -
From my work -as an IT consultant in one of the big 4- I can now show you my masterpiece
INSIGHTS FROM THE DAILY LIFE OF A FUNCTIONAL ANALIST IN A BIG 4 -I'M NOT A FUNCTIONAL ANALYST BUT THAT'S WHAT THEY DO-
- 10:30, enter the office. By contract you should be there at 9:00 but nobody gives a shit
- First task of the day: prepare the power point for the client. DURATION: 15 minutes to actually make the powerpoint, 45 minutes to search all the possible synonyms of RESILIENCE BIG DATA AGILE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MACHINE LEARNING SHIT PISS CUM, 1 hour to actually present the document.
- 12:30: Sniff the powder left by the chalks on the blackboards. Duration: 30 minutes, that's a lot of chalk you need to snort.
13:00, LUNCH TIME. You get back to work not one minute sooner than 15.00
- 15:00, conference with the HR. You need to carefully analyze the quantity and quality of the farts emitted in the office for 2 hours at least
- 17:00 conference call, a project you were assigned to half a day ago has a server down.
The client sent two managers, three senior Java developers, the CEO, 5 employees -they know logs and mails from the last 5 months line by line-, 4 lawyers and a beheading teacher from ISIS.
On your side there are 3 external ucraininans for the maintenance, successors of the 3 (already dead) developers who put the process in place 4 years ago according to God knows which specifications. They don't understand a word of what is being said.
Then there's the assistant of the assistant of a manager from another project that has nothing to do with this one, a feces officer, a sys admin who is going to watch porn for the whole conference call and won't listen a word, two interns to make up a number and look like you're prepared. Current objective: survive. Duration: 2 hours and a half.
- 19:30, snort some more chalk for half an hour, preparing for the mail in which you explain the associate partner how because of the aforementioned conference call we're going to lose a maintenance contract worth 20 grands per month (and a law proceeding worth a number of dollars you can't even read) and you have no idea how could this happen
- 20:00, timesheet! Compile the weekly report, write what you did and how long did it take for each task. You are allowed to compile 8 hours per day, you worked at least 11 but nobody gives a shit. Duration: 30 minutes
- 20:30, update your consultant! Training course, "tasting cum and presenting its organoleptic properties to a client". Bearing with your job: none at all. Duration: 90 minutes, then there's half an hour of evaluating test where you'll copy the answers from a sheet given to you by a colleague who left 6 months ago.
- 22:30, CHANCE CARD! You have a new mail from the HR: you asked for a refund for a 3$ sandwich, but the receipt isn't there and they realized it with a 9 months delay. You need to find that wicked piece of paper. DURATION: 30 minutes. The receipt most likely doesn't even exist anymore and will be taken directly from your next salary.
- 23:00 you receive a message on Teams. It's the intern. It's very late but you're online and have to answer. There's an exception on a process which have been running for 6 years with no problems and nobody ever touches. The intern doesn't know what to do, but you wrote the specifications for the thing, 6 years ago, and everything MUST run tonight. You are not a technician and have no fucking clue about anyhing at all. 30 minutes to make sure it's something on our side and not on the client side, and in all that the intern is as useful as a confetto to wipe your ass. Once you're sure it's something on our side you need to search for the senior dev who received the maintenance of the project, call him and solve the problem.
It turns out a file in a shared folder nobody ever touches was unreachable 'cause one of your libraries left it open during the last run and Excel shown a warning modal while opening it; your project didn't like this last thing one bit. It takes 90 minutes to find the root of the problem, you solve it by rebooting one of your machines. It's 01:00.
You shower, watch yourself on the mirror and search for the line where your forehead ends and your hair starts. It got a little bit back from yesterday; the change can't be seen with the naked eye but you know it's there.
You cry yourself to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, but it's going to be exactly like today.8 -
Alright, so my company wanted to redesign its old website, so we (the dev team) got tasked with making it happen.
Talking with the people making the marketing decisions for the site (think clients but in-house) :
CLIENT : We don't want any colors, black and white only, it's trendy.
US : Okay, but you actually do need colors for call to actions, to achieve the effect of levels of importance and such.
CLIENT : No colors.
Why would they listen to us, not that we are the experts are anything... Oh and they scrapped pretty much all of our CTA, why would you need those anyways, right?
Sometimes later, while coding the Dealer Locator :
CLIENT : The more important dealers will be shown on the map in black, the ones a little less important in white, and the ones we would rather not send people to will be in blue.
US : In blue? Blue, the only color in a sea of black and white? You do realize that the only thing the user is going to see are the blue ones, achieving the exact opposite of what you want?
CLIENT : We have decided.
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻6 -
*client calls*
Me: Hello?
Client: Hi, I have some questions about the project.
Me: Alright, what are they?
Client: I don't quite remember what my questions are.
What? Then why did you call me?2 -
~ Freelancer.com Week #1 ~
Project: I need someone to debug an application's code and review it. Budget 30 bucks.
Bid: I am an experienced developer I can probably review it in an hour.
client: Hi, need you to check if app is contains virus [link to scam website]
me: sure, download supposed "social Bitcoin miner" and run some AV tests...8+ positive flags for a Trojan virus.
>Me: It's a Trojan virus mate it's not legitimate😟
>Client: Can you remove the Trojan virus so that the legit not stays?
Me: Umm there is no bot mate it's just a virus 😕 I wouldn't open it outside a sandbox
Client: But here it says Bitcoin faucet bot [links shitty how-to youtube video]
Me: 😒 it's not real dude you are about to get scammed, I can test it in a VM if you. . .
Client: I opened it already, it's working
Me: 😮 r u sure?
Client: yes, can you install VM for further testing?
Me: sure, in your computer?
Client: yes
Me: just download the windows image and text me when it's done
Client: My disc is full! Only 3 gb left
Me: 😑 call me when you clean it
Client: [ offline ]5 -
Just managed to setup a tiny/simple privacy-friendly analytics system.
You basically call an api from your backend with the api key and all the headers you received from the browser (php and Apache or nginx in my case) and the analytics api gets useful stuff out of that data without sacrificing privacy.
I get a little bit more insight into my websites usage and the client isn't sacrificing identifiable information!
I've been wanting to make this fucker for fucking months.11 -
There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.
The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.
I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.
At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.
I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.
Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.
However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.1 -
Client : hey why does your app minimize once I receive a call? Fix this ASAP! Also why does it show *that*? I have not turned anything on!
Me : Sorry, not possible (explains), you might want to contact Google (for the lolz). Also, the feature is shown by default, you can turn it off via Menu - Settings - Navigation - xxx.
Client : Can you make the incoming call popup smaller when using your app?
Me : Unfortunately no, that's not something I can do. Contact LG.
Client : I have been to Menu - Settings - Map - XXX and the feature is still shown, why does your software not work? Also *this and that* is not shown anymore!
Me : You turned off the wrong thing... *jumps out of the window* *contemplates life* *cries* *dies*1 -
Long rant!!!
Let me give you a little back story first
So I was building a mobile app for a client who is to say the least a big PAIN IN THE ASS!
And once I completed the final edits he requests and sent him the app for approval, he calls me and starts asking about some features in the app if it has does or not (which the app does). The main reason for this rant is the feature about the app being able to open the links of the website inside the app without going to the browser first.
But what was happening when the client clicked on the link, since it’s a newspaper type of app, he got asked in which browser he wanted to open the link and after the browser was opened it returned him to the app and asked if he wants that link be opened in the app or browser again. So I can understand his confusion and anger with this problem so I started to debug to see what is happening since I now this featured worked before and had it on video to show it does. After a few minutes I noticed that the links were being added as google.com/url?q={CLIENT_URL}/something_else instead of just www.client_url.com/article
Obviously not my fault as I don’t do content for the website but some other person. But once I called him back and explained the situation to him, he started yelling at me for not being able to create the feature and not notifying him of the mistake his author was making. After about 10mins of him yelling I snapped and just angrily told him “I don’t hear any problems with the app, as far as I’m concerned it can be published as is, as there is not problem on my side”. Then he got even more angry and started talking more shit about how this is all my fault and how I’m a bad programmer and how his users are gonna just delete the app once they see this and I should find a way to fix those links.
And to clarify some more, if there was like 5-10 articles I would do it, just so that I don’t have to listen to him, but there are more than 1 or 2k articles with about 2-5 links per article that were added like that.
After his call I called my boss and told him what happened, and he said he will talk to the client and explain to him how he will be able to communicate with me from now on and in what tone. As I’m not allowed to tell clients anymore to go fuck themselves, since I did it once. But I can call my boss and he does it for me :D
//END RANT !!!4 -
Worst meeting:
Boss: *calls everyone* URGENT MEETING. If you're on your lunch break, then stop and join the video call. Is it a weird time in your timezone? Wake up. But COME
Omg what happened? Is the server down? Are we getting a huge client? What is so urgent that it needs all of our attention right now?
Boss: I'm afraid that I won't be able to stay long in this meeting.
... then WHY the f did you call this meeting?
Boss: that's why we'll have a meeting next at *such hour*. In the meantime, talk to your respective departments about what you've been doing and what you need from each other. See you!
No comment6 -
Sometimes I have really loose the will to live and find myself face palming multiple times.
I added live chat software a web frontend for a client. Very easy job that consisted of pasting in some embed code. The actual software is very good and has native ios/andriod apps - something specifically requested.
I got a call from my client about an hour ago, saying there is a "serious issue with the live chat".
My client stated the live chat won't work when his staff go home. He asked me what my solution to this was.
Saying "wtf" many times to myself I directed him to a settings within the chat software i.e. an "away mode" where an email is sent when no chat agents are available.
This apparently wasn't good enough and said I hadn't followed his brief of "adding life chat software to the website", which I had.
After a lengthy discussion I found the root of his frustration. He'd signed a contract with a client of his own, stating there would be 24/7 support via live chat on the website.
Obviously there a huge difference between adding a chat widget to a website and committing to having it manned 24/7 :)
After a further 10 minutes of trying push the blame on myself, the client insisted of having the chat software "appear" as someone was always online, even when they are not (people need to sleep ya know!).
Bu design, the chat software requires at least one agent be logged in before the chat status changes to "online" - why wouldn't it.
After a little while I was seriously wondering why I'm involved in this conversation. I jokingly stated: "Well you could always install Andriod/iOS app on your phone, login and permanently leave it running in background. You'd get lots of notifications, but the site would say the live is always online".
The latter was something I said in jest. To my surprise the client said he'd do that on his own phone going forwards. He actually thanked me for my "resourcefulness", lol.
I'm looking at the same dashboard now and there are 407 pending chat requests - his phone must literally be blowing up notifications :)
5 -
Warning: long read....
I got a call this morning from a client who was panicking about not being able to login to his web panel.
So I went to the web panel and tried to login and was just redirected back to the login page. No errors or anything (at least visible on the page). Went looking for an error_log file and found it.
It turns out there was an error was showing: Disk quota exceeded.
So I went into the cPanel and checked, he used about 16GB out of 100GB and that got me confused. So I looked around and found out he was using about 510000/500000 inodes.
Went looking trough FTP to see where he has so many files and try and remove some.
Well it turns out that there were about 7 injected websites (warez, online casino, affiliate one etc) and a full hacking web panel on his FTP. After detailed analysis some who actually built the site (I just maintain some parts) made an upload form available to public with any checks on it. Meaning anyone could upload whatever they wanted and the form would allow it.
The worst part is that the client is not allowing us to secure the form with some sort of login or remove it completely (the best option) as it is not really needed but he uses it to upload some pdf catalogs or something.
TL; DR;
Old programmer created an upload form that was accessible to anyone on the web without adding any security or check as to see what kind of files was getting uploaded. Which lead to having maximum number on inodes used on server and client being unable to login.
Side note:
And ofc I had to go and fix the mess behind him again, even though he stopped working a long time ago and I started just recently and have been having nightmares of this project.2 -
The website for our biggest client went down and the server went haywire. Though for this client we don’t provide any infrastructure, so we called their it partner to start figuring this out.
They started blaming us, asking is if we had upgraded the website or changed any PHP settings, which all were a firm no from us. So they told us they had competent people working on the matter.
TL;DR their people isn’t competent and I ended up fixing the issue.
Hours go by, nothing happens, client calls us and we call the it partner, nothing, they don’t understand anything. Told us they can’t find any logs etc.
So we setup a conference call with our CXO, me, another dev and a few people from the it partner.
At this point I’m just asking them if they’ve looked at this and this, no good answer, I fetch a long ethernet cable from my desk, pull it to the CXO’s office and hook up my laptop to start looking into things myself.
IT partner still can’t find anything wrong. I tail the httpd error log and see thousands upon thousands of warning messages about mysql being loaded twice, but that’s not the issue here.
Check top and see there’s 257 instances of httpd, whereas 256 is spawned by httpd, mysql is using 600% cpu and whenever I try to connect to mysql through cli it throws me a too many connections error.
I heard the IT partner talking about a ddos attack, so I asked them to pull it off the public network and only give us access through our vpn. They do that, reboot server, same problems.
Finally we get the it partner to rollback the vm to earlier last night. Everything works great, 30 min later, it crashes again. At this point I’m getting tired and frustrated, this isn’t my job, I thought they had competent people working on this.
I noticed that the db had a few corrupted tables, and ask the it partner to get a dba to look at it. No prevail.
5’o’clock is here, we decide to give the vm rollback another try, but first we go home, get some dinner and resume at 6pm. I had told them I wanted to be in on this call, and said let me try this time.
They spend ages doing the rollback, and then for some reason they have to reconfigure the network and shit. Once it booted, I told their tech to stop mysqld and httpd immediately and prevent it from start at boot.
I can now look at the logs that is leading to this issue. I noticed our debug flag was on and had generated a 30gb log file. Tail it and see it’s what I’d expect, warmings and warnings, And all other logs for mysql and apache is huge, so the drive is full. Just gotta delete it.
I quietly start apache and mysql, see the website is working fine, shut it down and just take a copy of the var/lib/mysql directory and etc directory just go have backups.
Starting to connect a few dots, but I wasn’t exactly sure if it was right. Had the full drive caused mysql to corrupt itself? Only one way to find out. Start apache and mysql back up, and just wait and see. Meanwhile I fixed that mysql being loaded twice. Some genius had put load mysql.so at the top and bottom of php ini.
While waiting on the server to crash again, I’m talking to the it support guy, who told me they haven’t updated anything on the server except security patches now and then, and they didn’t have anyone familiar with this setup. No shit, it’s running php 5.3 -.-
Website up and running 1.5 later, mission accomplished.6 -
>> this === rant
<< true
At beginning of this year, I only knew HTML, JS, and CSS so I just applied for offers like "Jr Apprentice Dev in Front-End"
In a interview call, the woman told me that they will send me a test asking about my JS and HTML5 knowledge.
When I look in my inbox, the mail subject says "Back-end Test".
Then I call the woman:
Me: "Hello, I have received the test mail, but maybe it's wrong. I applied for a Front-End position and the test is about backend! "
She: "Do you have skills in JS and HTML5?"
Me: "Yes!, and CSS3"
She: "Well, the test is about that. JS, jQuery, and HTML5"
Me: "..."
Me: "Sorry, that languages are Front-End. In the subject say 'Back-End' and Back-End is PHP, SQL, MySQL, Java, .Net... I don't know nothing about that. I only know HTML, JS, CSS."
She: "It's the same"
Me: "I sorry but it's not the same. Fron-End is client-side, what users sees. Animation, colors, FXs, buttons, forms... And Back-End is server-side, what users doesn't see."
She: "Well, JS, HTML, and CSS is backend for us. We call it that way too"
Me: "Sorry but that is wrong. I invite you to read some basic info. Now I am confused"
Of course that I am not confused. That idi0t was wrong.
Perhaps recruiters should take some info about areas where they are recruiting... (:T)3 -
I'm a tech lead for a digital agency.
Digital agencies are universally known for being shite. Why? Because they typically push through sub-optimal code with very little testing over tiny deadlines for maximum profit. Maybe I've just had bad experiences but this is the 5th digital agency that I've worked at that does this bollocks.
I am currently sitting on a Teams call at 8:39pm because the fuckwit project/account managers are unable to face up to the big scary client and ask them terrifying questions like "Is this bug a blocker for the deployment?" or "We don't have enough time to fix/change these things, can we delay another day?". They just assume that A - We will work into the evening, and B - that all the issues are P1 and that we should all 'pull together' as 'team players' to get this done in time.
No, Me and my team have to work into the evening for seemingly free because these pricks can't do their jobs properly.
The funniest thing of all? When I speak to the CTO about overtime payment he tries to make me feel bad about "we don't typically pay for overtime..."
Fuck Everyone.
Time to find a new contract.11 -
It fucking staggers me how many backend/devops-y people don't understand what a client side "request timeout" is, versus a server side one.
What does it mean:
The client was fed up with the servers bullshit, and decided to piss off and not wait around for the server to take forever to respond, because life's too short.
How not to solve/debug this issue:
- "I've checked the API request in tool xyz, and it works fine for me"
Congratulations, you've figured out how to call an API once, in isolation to the rest of the application, and without any excessive load. And using a different client to me, with a different configuration. Lets get back to actually looking at the issue shall we?
- "I only see HTTP 200's in the logs"
Yep, you probably will in most circumstances, because its the client complaining about it taking too long, not the server. If the server was telepathetic and knew what the client was thinking/doing at all times, we wouldn't have half of the errors we do.
- "Ah ok, I understand ... so how do I solve this?"
Your asking me? I don't fucking know, I didn't build the server! Put better logging in place and figure out why sometimes it takes forever.
Jesus fucking christ14 -
That moment when you are at the hospital and your wife just gave birth. Boss is calling:
-Hi! congratulations on a baby!
-Thanks.
-I need something quick from you...
*connects me to live presentation with a client*
I said "Hi everyone!" and ended the call...
Didn't pick up since..
6 -
Once the system "lost" a user_id var that says who started a batch, but it was a mandatory field that was filled at the beginning of the process.
I tried to find the reason, failed, called a senior for help, he also failed to find the reason.
After a couple of hours I looked to him, he looked back and I said,
"Let's call it a solar flare bit flip?"
"It's the only logical explanation"
So it became a bit flip issue to the PM, we had a good laugh, we send as "system instability" to the client.
The bug never happened again, no one ever found the true reason, maybe it was really a bit flip 🤔1 -
!dev
Why are people such idiots?
This guy is so oblivious he reminds me of a client or PM.
Here’s the email conversation (since he refuses to answer his cell):
Me: Hey; I haven’t been able to reach you for several days. You must be busy! Let me know what time works best for you, and I’ll call you then. Alternatively, you can reach me at <number> any day this week (except Wednesday) from 11am PST (2pm EST) onward.
Him: I will call you at 2:30pm your time on Wednesday.
Me: As I stated in my email, Wednesday is the only day that doesn’t work for me.
Him: Are you free on Thursday?
Me (to audience): YOU FOOLISH, ILLITERATE TOAD!
Me: I am free Thursday (and Friday) from 11am PST and onward.10 -
I get a call from a client at 7 PM:
- Client: We have a business partner that just visited the website you just made for us and he said it was absolutely terrible, things are not showing up, layout is all messed up... *sends photo*. This is a VERY important new business partner and this will affect our relationship and image. Fix it NOW!
- Me: ok? I will check ... *proceed to check on several browsers and versions*
- Me: I checked on all modern browsers, cleaned cache, tried from multiple devices, it seems to be fine. What browser is your partner visiting the site from?
- Client: Idk, let me ask ...
- Client: Internet Explorer
- Me: ... that browser is not even supported anymore wth?!
- Client: We need it fixed!
- Me: ... *proceeds and hacks for IE website until 6 AM*7 -
At a certain client, was asked to help them with an "intermediary" solution to stopgap a license renewal on their HR recruiting system.
This is something I was very familiar with, so no big. Did some requirements gathering, told them we could knock it out in 6 weeks.
We start the project, no problems, everything is fine until about 2.5 weeks in. At this point, someone demands that we engage with the testing team early. It grates a little as this client had the typical Indian outsourcing mega-corp pointey-clickey shit show "testing" (automation? Did you mean '10 additional testers?') you get at companies who put business people in charge of technology, but I couldn't really argue with it.
So we're progressing along and the project manager decides now is a great time to bugger the fuck off to India for 3 months, so she's totally gone. This is the point it goes off the rails. Without a PM to control the scope, the "lead tester," we'll call her Shrilldesi, proceeds to sit in a room and start trying to control the design of the system. Rather than testing anything in the specification, she just looked at the existing full HRIS recruiting system they were using and starts submitting bugs for missing features. The fuckwit serfs they'd assigned from HR to oversee this process just allowed it to happen totally losing focus on the fact this was an interim solution to hold them over for 6 months and avoid a contract renewal.
I get real passive aggressive at this point and refuse to deliver anything outside the original scope. We negotiate and end up with about 150% scope bloat and a now untenable timeline that we delivered about 2 weeks late, but in the end that absolute whore made my life a living hell for the duration of the project. She then got the recognition at the project release for her "excellent work," no mention of the people who actually did the work.
Tl;Dr people suck and if you value your sanity, you'll avoid companies that say things like, "we're not in the technology business" as an excuse to have shitty, ignorant staff.6 -
Received a call from client complaining about stupidity of google analytics. He could not get pass Terms and Conditions page. Saying "I agree" button is faded away and can not be clicked.
He just needed to scroll the page down.
What happened to people nowdays?2 -
Picture the situation: My ex-boss (still a friend) has a client that wants a web site. He hired me to to the HTML/CSS and a design agency to design the website.
There was a call on Skype today with me, the ex-boss, the client and a designer from the agency.
They kept arguing about how to client would feel on each page, what content should be in each page and only talked among themselfs.
I was dead silent for the last half and hour and suddenly my roomate yells something and the whole Skype call stays silent as I hear "Were you sleeping?" me: "No, I'm good! Don`t worry about it!". They continued talking and I went to get dinner and asked my ex-boss to tell me later what I needed to know in order to finish the job, which he understood and was really cool about it. I don't think they missed me.
Skype calls can be extremely boring.2 -
(Instant Message)
Client: Are you there?
Me: Yes speak please.
(Why don't you just leave the message? It's not like having a phone call…)
Client: The contract is ready. I'll send it to you.
(Waited for an akaward 10 minute…)
Client: ???Can you receive it???
(Omg are you doing SSL handshake or what? Just send the file!)
Me: Yes I can pleasre send it to me thank you so much.
So after promoting Flutter to the clients (for whom cross plateform solution are perfect match) for almost a year, today I finally got the first ever Flutter App contract. I believ e time for Flutter is really coming. Wish me luck!5 -
No, I do not wish to work on your Scrum-managed project.
I do not wish to contribute to the Taylorism of my profession.
I do not wish to be an interchangeable cog in your software sausage machine.
I do not wish to be tracked by some pointless metrics like a call-centre worker.
I do not wish to bust my tight, cute ass to sprint after some idiotic management request that could have been factored in earlier.
I do not wish to obtain some piss-ant qualification that "authorises" me to do my job.
I do not wish to be party to your lie that technical debt will be avoided by refactoring---whatever the cost.
I do not wish to contribute to the death of software engineering to have it replaced by software development.
Agile? Sure. I can pick up the phone and talk to the client, users and fellow devs. After all, that's what it FUCKING MEANS. Communi-fucking-cation.
See that burndown chart? See your anus? Know what's happening next?
Fuck Scrum and every fucking bottom-feeder that is scamming a living by promoting it. You're killing this business.
Hugs and kisses,
Platypus15 -
Just got a call about a site I made fo someone being down. It's 3am on a Monday morning. I have school in 6 hours. My client knows this. Go fuck yourself I'm not getting out of bed at 3 in the morning.
Note: we live in the same time zone.5 -
I was working for a web company as an intern and they had maintained a lot of high profile websites like celeberties, government and radio/tv. I recieve 2 mails with news updates from the clients pretty much at the same time.
One was a formal call for a campaign of one of our biggest clients, and the other was from of our small clients that was into cat breeding.
Since we use our custom cms for all the sites I sucked at multitasking back then - I published the news on the wrong sites so for a good hour i made our high profile client a cat breeder...2 -
I’m fucking done….
I don’t even know what to tell.
I’m a CTO in a startu. We have pretty good traction, my salary is about average senior dev salary (plus 10%).
I’m good financially.
But I have no more pleasure in work. Like at all.
“This API call performance is bad”
Yeah I know, maybe you shpuldn’t try to call it for 1000 objects at the time ?
“We need to reduce Azure cost”
Yeah I know, but are you ready to live with performances downgrade it will generate ?
“I don’t understand on what thing you worked past week, where is a devops card ?
Fuck you, I’m in extenuating fire mode, I don’t have time for a fucking devops card
“We should migrate whole stack to modern technology, like JavaScript”
Thank you for your imput, Blazor WAS created to avoid JabaScript
“The client has only 1.000.000 records and API doesn’t return them all”
Use fucking paging moron. And BTW, I’m adding “number of authorized requests” shortly.
I can go on and on and on for hours. But the idea is : I completely lost the will or motivation to do anything. I’m considering just to quit and go back to be Junior dev for a random company.9 -
Easy. Was creating a website for a client and they asked if we could add "those, what do you call them? Yeah cliparts" to the website.
Cliparts? Really? Those silly cartoon things from MS Office?5 -
So my client wants to stick with their current hosting provider (Bell) because the company is "big" and "won't go anywhere anytime soon." I just said, well okay it can't be that bad. Bell charges about 10x more and gives you about 10x less compared to other options, but it's not my money so whatever. Well, Bell has the absolute worst customer service. They have an online support form where I can type in my questions and they will call me within a day to help me. They called me during work hours and I missed the call, so they sent me an email to let me know I missed the call and gave me a number to call. I called and I might as well have called my dog because the support didn't even know what a .htaccess file is. I emailed them back and asked if they could forward my email to someone in the hosting department that could help (because the phone support I got was shit). I got a reply saying they "can't"... yup, they used the word "can't", they can't forward the email and that I would have to call. Is everyone at Bell a fucking dick chugging brainless pile of moldy-ass shit biscuits!? YOU CAN"T SEND AN EMAIL? Turns out they do have a dedicated hosting support email, let's hope the email I send ends up in front of someone at Bell who at least has a slight clue how to use a keyboard.3
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I have a Windows machine sitting behind the TV, hooked to two controllers, set up as basically a console for the big TV. It doesn't get a lot of use, and mostly just churns out folding@home work units lately. It's connected by ethernet via a wired connection, and it has a local static IP for the sake of simplicity.
In January, Windows Update started throwing a nonspecific error and failing. After a couple weeks I decided to look up the error, and all the recommendations I found online said to make sure several critical services were running. I did, but it appeared to make no difference.
Yesterday, I finally engaged MS support. Priyank remoted into my machine and attempted all the steps I had already tried. I just let him go, so he could get through his checklist and get to the resolution steps. Well, his checklist began and ended with those steps, and he started rather insistently telling me that I had to reinstall, and that he had to do it for me. I told him no thank you, "I know how to reinstall windows, and I'll do it when I'm ready."
In his investigation though, I did notice that he opened MS Edge and tried to load Bing to search for something. But Edge had no connection. No pages would load. I didn't take any special notice of it at the time though, because of the argument I was having with him about reinstalling. And it was no great loss to me that Edge wasn't working, because that was literally the first time it'd ever been launched on that computer.
We got off the phone and I gave him top marks in the CS survey that was sent, as it appeared there was nothing he could do. It wasn't until a couple hours later that I remembered the connectivity problem. I went back and checked again. Edge couldn't load anything. Firefox, the ping command, Steam, Vivaldi, parsec and RDP all worked fine. The Windows Store couldn't connect either. That was when it occurred to me that its was likely that Windows Update was just unable to reach the internet.
As I have no problem whatsoever with MS services being unable to call home, I began trying to set up an on-demand proxy for use when I want to update, and I noticed that when I fill out the proxy details in Internet Options, or in Windows 10's more windows10-ish UI for a system proxy, the "save" button didn't respond to clicks. So I looked that problem up, and saw that it depends on a service called WinHttpAutoProxySvc, which I found itself depends on something called IP Helper, which led me to the root cause of all my issues: IP Helper now depends on the DHCP Client service, which I have explicitly disabled on non-wifi Windows installs since the '90s.
Just to see, I re-enabled DHCP Client, and boom! Everything came back on. Edge, the MS Store, and Windows Update all worked. So I updated, went through a couple reboots-- because that's the name of the game with windows update --and had a fully updated machine.
It occurred to me then that this is probably how MS sends all its spy data too, and since the things I actually use work just fine, I disabled DHCP Client again. I figure that's easier than navigating an intentionally annoying menu tree of privacy options that changes and resets with every major update.
But holy shit, microsoft! How can you hinge the entire system's OS connectivity on something that not everybody uses?
9 -
If you're a client and abuse the info given to you by any of the platforms to come visit me, I won't hestitate to call the police again, you fucking lunatic.
In what fucking mind does that even make sense, so damn lucky I wasn't actually here and just saw it on the CCTV, fucking trespassing piece of shit.
Waiting for the police to report back, so I can use any possible opportunity to reflect it in his public record, fucking cunt. -
So last night was a Friday. After leaving the gym I noticed a missed call and a voicemail from my client.
Note this was sent at 21:50 on a Friday night.
My client stated they were "rather disappointed" (to use their phrasing) that I didn't answer. There is no contract that I answer out of hours or any issues with their system.
This morning, I noticed my client followed up with an email. It was a single line saying they found some new AWS services they like to talk about (translate: "I've found some new AWS acronyms that sound cool that I wish to talk about for several hours").
Emergency! :)
Seriously, clients, sometimes :(
4 -
You can't keep wasting your time on people who do not know what the fuck they want. You could be way more time efficient with serious clients.
*After I have finally deployed the requested features*
Client: Why did it take you two weeks in the end? You said it would take you a couple days.
Me: Because you told me to use my imagination on half of the tasks and you kept wanting me to change what I had created, thus unnecessarily doubling the time it should have taken. Besides that probably the unclear communication and the fact that you rarely called me back after you told me to call you.
Client: So if I tell you, exactly, how I want it next time you'll be able to do it in a couple days?
Me: I'm not sure, that depends on what you want. Tell me, exactly, what you want.
Client: Oh it's not much, I'll let you do your thing for the most.
Me: I can't handle another request, sorry. *Ends call*4 -
I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).
summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations
summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!
Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy
Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.
Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.
Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.
Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?
Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.
But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.
Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.3 -
Ah, the awkward moment when you're told to join a conference call to "just listen in the background so you know what's going on"
...and then no-one else from your company turns up, so you're stuck trying to appease a client while having absolutely no idea what's going on...5 -
You guys, I think I know what is it....I think I know why I wanted to be a developer.
It started off innocently enough. I was a young lad in IT. Wide-eyed. Absorbing anything and everything I could. Then, the asshole clients came.....
I would put on my best customer service face on, and address the client as calmly and as respectfully as I could. Reminding myself that their frustration is understandable.
To deal with the increased time dealing with clients took, I developed scripts to help me handle maintenance and keep my head above water. I developed scripts to streamline equipment provisioning for big deployments. I developed scripts to handle other technicians who didn't log-off the phone queue and fucked up our on-call flow. I put in place email rules to sift through the bullshit and time wasters.
I became a developer to streamline and make myself as efficient as possible. But the clients keep nagging. The bullshit keeps coming. The other players get in your fucking way.
There is no end you guys.... THIS IS ONLY TUESDAY. I can't script the passage of time. I'm....I'm.... I need a fucking nap.1 -
Today a potential client contacted me after seeing my works and said they were really interested in having me work on their project. Then, they demanded that I scheduled a call with them, using their calendar app. I did, just to them cancel it a few hours later. Without any explanation.
Deal with people is so discouraging sometimes.2 -
Oh, my promotion happens whenever I'm on a call with a sales guy, who announces they have a (insert grandiose job title here) on the call in case the client has any technical questions.
Unfortunately it comes with no pay rise, and I'm immediately demoted again when the call ends ;)1 -
This is something I'll never forget.
I'm a senior UI engineer. I was working at a digital agency at the time and got tasked with refactoring and improving an existing interface from a well known delivery company.
I open the code and what do I find? Indentation. But not in the normal sense. The indentation only went forward, randomly returning a bunch of tabs back in the middle of the file a few times, but never returning to its initial level after closing a tag or function, both on HTML and JS.
Let that sink in for a minute and try to imagine what it does to your editor with word wrapping (1 letter columns), and without (absurd horizontal scrolling).
Using Sublime at the time, ctrl+shift+P, reindent. Everything magically falls beautifully into place. Refactor the application, clean up the code, document it, package it and send it back (zip files as they didn't want to provide version control access, yay).
The next day, we get a very angry call from the client saying that their team is completely lost. I prove to the project manager that my code is up to scratch, running fine, no errors, tested, good performance. He returns to the client and proves that it's all correct (good PM with decent tech knowledge).
The client responds with "Yeah, the code is running, but our team uses tabs for version control and now we lost all versioning!".
Bear in mind this was in 2012, git was around for 7 years then, and SVN and Mercury much longer.
I then finally understood the randomness of the tabs. The code would go a bunch of tabs back when it went back to a previous version, everything above were additions or modifications that joined seamlessly with the previous version before, with no way to know when and so on.
I immediately told the PM that was absurd, he agreed, and told the client we wouldn't be reindenting everything back for them according to the original file.
All in all, it wasn't a bad experience due to a competent PM, but it left a bad taste in my mouth to know companies have teams that are that incompetent, and that no one thought to stop and say "hey, this may cause issues down the line".4 -
Don't you hate it when your co-worker does dumb things, but thinks it's the "clean code" way?
The following is a conversation between me and a co-worker, who thinks he's superior to everyone because he thinks he's the only one who read the Clean Code series. Let's call him Bill.
Me: I think the feature we need is quite simple, our application needs to call this third party API, parse the response and pass it to the next step. Why do you need to bury everything under an abstraction of 4 layers?
Bill: bEcAuSe It'S dEcOuPlInG, aNd MaKe ThE cOdE tEsTaBlE
Me: I don't know man, you only need to abstract the third party api client, and then mock it if you want. Some interfaces you define makes no sense at all. For example, this interface only has 1 concrete implementation, and I don't think it will ever have another. Besides, the concrete implementation only gets the input from the upper layer and passes it down the lower layer. Why the extra step? I feel like you're using interface just for the sake of interface.
Bill: PrOgRaMmInG tO iNtErFaCe, NoT cOnCrEtE iPlEmEnTaTiOn!!!
Me: You keep saying those words, I don't think they mean what you think they mean. But they certainly do not mean that every method argument must be an interface
Bill: BuT uNcLe BoB blah blah blah...
Me: *gives up all hope*14 -
Client : I am unable to download data from your sever for last 10 days.
Me : Sir, we are sorry to hear that. We are doing some maintenances on our server from this morning today. We request you to call back us in next 4 hours.
Client : But i am facing this problem for last 10 days.
Me: Sir, i heard you. As maintenance is going on it will not be possible to download data this time.
Client: From when this maintenance is going on?
Me: from this morning sir.
Client : but i am facing this probolem for last 10 days.
Me: Sir, you are not understanding it, or may be i am failing to describe the situation to you...
Client: Listen, you guys are incapable. Only knows to make excuse.
Me: Sir..
Client: Sorry to say, i am not Happy with your support. Let me talk to your senior tech guy.
Me : Sir, your problem will be solved in next 4 hours. We will call you as soon as our server went online.
Client: *.....*
It took me 20 minutes to finally make him understand the situation.
Client: Why did not you said that earlier? You guys will have all the time but i do not. Anyway.
He hangs the phone.
My ears are burning man...9 -
Client : We have performance issues on <this> page.
US : Testing with their data on : Xeon : All good, Core i7 : all good, Core i5 : all good, A smartphone : all good, core i5 UM version from 5 years ago (You know, 1.8Ghz, 2 cores, not 4) : all good.
US : Could you share your screen and show us ?
Client : Sure ! Shares his screen. Chrome is already opened. Refreshes the page, after 15 seconds, chrome : Would you like to stop script on this page ?”
US with mic on mute : “WTF?! It cannot happen here. It’s only a list of about 500 rows!”.
US : “Hello, could you open a tasks manager?”
Client : “ Sure, but I need to do it through here”
Some random VID interface popping up. Opens tasks manager with a beautiful “48 vCPUs detected”.
I have no idea how their virtualization is settled, but it seems to be messed up. Tomorrow going to be fun. I have a call at 9am to explain them their problem. Their IT will hate me forever.
If anyone has tips on Chrome through virtualization, please tell me.
EDIT : Yes 48. Not 4-8. It's not an error6 -
Today I had the most f...g ABSURD and POINTLESS meeting with the client ever, that was arranged by the sales! I drove f...g 100km there and f...g 100km back to have a meeting that lasted about 20 minutes. And it's not even the worst yet. It turned out that I was not even the right person to be there. So guess what - the whole meeting boiled down to me making a phonecall on a loudspeaker to the f...g right person. I have wasted half a day and I HAVE OFFICIALY BECAME THE MOST EXPENSIVE PHONE HOLDER!! Not that I have not insisted a few times before to make a call to ensure that the meeting is necessary at all.2
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Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.
One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.
I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.
I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.
We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.
[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.
tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.2 -
Hi everyone, just discovered this wonderful community and I've got a new rant just for the occasion.
I work at a creative agency and we offer writing, design and web development.
This client wanted the whole package, so we've written a ton a copy, got it approved, sent it to translation, got it approved, designed both print and digital assets and developed a website.
Everything was looking good, files sent to the printer, website ready to be deployed...
Then we get a call and a PDF of text changes. The stuff is already printed.
The business owner's wife (not an employee) took it upon herself to make changes to the text, some of which have grammatical and spelling mistakes.
Everything has to be delayed, files have to be resent to the printer, project goes over budget, we're pissed, the printer is pissed and their director of communications is pissed.
What a shit show. I wonder who's going to get thrown under the bus for this one.3 -
client : show website
me: sir server is down
client : what? I don't know,I want to see my website.
me: sir try to understand it is not my issue
client *call cut*
fucking asshole -_-1 -
Diary of an insane lead dev: day 447
pdf thumbnails that the app generates are now in S3 instead of saved on disk.
when they were on disk, we would read them from disk into a stream and then create a stream response to the client that would then render the stream in the UI (hey, I didn't write it, I just had to support it)
one of my lazy ass junior devs jumps on modifying it before I can; his solution is to retrieve the file from the cloud now, convert the stream into a base64 encoded string, and then shove that string into an already bloated viewmodel coming from the server to be rendered in the UI.
i'm like "why on earth are you doing that? did you even test the result of this and notice that rendering those thumbnails now takes 3 times as long???"
jr: "I mean, it works doesn't it?"
seriously, if the image file is already hosted on the cloud, and you can programmatically determine its URL, why wouldn't you just throw that in the src attribute in your html tag and call it a day? why would you possibly think that the extra overhead of retrieving and converting the file before passing it off to the UI in an even larger payload than before would result in a good user experience for the client???
it took me all of 30 seconds to google and find out that AWS SDK has a method to GetPreSignedURL on a private file uploaded to s3 and you can set when it expires, and the application is dead at the end of the year.
JFC. I hate trying to reason with these fuckheads by saying "you are paid for you brain, fucking USE IT" because, clearly these code monkeys do not have brains.3 -
The moment I told my client that I can't do the ewallet project for RM 30 which is so underpriced.
He call his son who is a lawyer to sue me for the blablabla....
.......
3 -
Fucked!
I have got my cyber security exam tomorrow morning and i just got a call from a client to make some urgent changes to his site.
To add to it, i already wasted around half an hour becoz GoDaddy Plex somehow decided to block my own IP in the firewall.
And now I am on devRant.
Crap. I am fucked!4 -
TLDR: crappy api + idiot ex client combo rant // devam si duška
I saw a lot of people bitching about APIs that don't return proper response codes and other stuff..
Well let me tell you a story. I used to work on a project where we had to do something like booking, but better..crossbreed with the Off&Away bidding site (which btw we had to rip off the .js stuff and reverse engineer the whole timer thingy), using free versions of everything..even though money wasn't an issue (what our client said). Same client decided to go with transhotel because it was sooooo gooood... OK? Why did noone heard of them then?
Anyhow, the api was xml based.. we had to send some xml that was validated against a schema, we received another that was supposed to be validated againts another schema.. and so on and so on..
...
...
supposed..
The API docs were nonexistent.. What was there, was broken English or Spanish.. Even had some comments like Add This & that to chapter xy.. Of course that chapter didn't even exist yet. :( And the last documentation they had, was really really old..more than a year, with visible gaps, we got the validation schemas not even listed in the docs, let alone described properly.
Yaaay! And that was not everything.. besides wrong and missing data, the API itself caused the 500 server error whenever you were no longer authenticated.
Of course it didn't tell you that your session was dead.. Just pooof! Unhandled crap everywhere!
And the best part?! We handled that login after inspecting what the hell happened, but sent the notification to the company anyways.. We had a conf call, and sent numerous emails explaining to them what a 'try catch' is and how they should handle the not authenticated error <= BTW they should have had a handled xml response for that, we got the schema for it! But they didn't. Anyhow, after two agonizing days talking back and forth they at least set up the server to be available again after the horrified 500 error. Before, it even stopped responding until reset (don't ask me how they managed to do that).
Oh yeah, did I mention this was a worldwide renown company?! Where everybody spoke/wrote English?! Yup, they have more than 700 people there, of course they speak English! <= another one of my ex clients fabulous statements... making me wanna strangle him with his tie.. I told him I am not talking to them because no-one there understood/spoke English and it would be a waste of my time.. Guess who spent almost 3 hours to talk to someone who sounded like a stereotypical Indian support tech guy with a flue speaking Italian?! // no offence please for the referenced parties!!
So yeah, sadly I don't have SS of the fucked up documentation..and I cannot post more details (not sure if the NDA still holds even though they canceled the project).. Not that I care really.. not after I saw how the client would treat his customers..
Anywayz I found on the interwebz some proof that this shitty api existed..
picture + link: https://programmableweb.com/api/...
SubRant: the client was an idiot! Probably still is, but no longer my client..
Wanted to store the credit card info + cvc and owner info etc.. in our database.. for easier second payment, like on paypal (which he wanted me to totally customize the payment page of paypal, and if that wasn't possible to collect user data on our personalized payment page and then just send it over to paypal api, if possible in plaintext, he just didn't care as long as he got his personalized payment page) or sth.... I told the company owner that they are fucking retards if they think they can pull this off & that they will lose all their (potential) clients if they figure that out.. or god forbid someone hacked us and stole the data.. I think this shit is also against the law..
I think it goes without saying what happened next.. called him ignorant stupid fucktard to his face and told him I ain't doing that since our company didn't even had a certificate to store the last 4 numbers.. They heard my voice over the whole firm.. we had fish-tank like offices, so they could all see me yelling at the director..
Guess who got laid off due to not being needed anymore the next day?! It was the best day of my life..so far!! Never have I been happier to lose my job!!
P.S. all that crap + test + the whole backand for analysis, the whole crm + campaign emails etc.. the client wanted done in 6 months.. O.o
P.P.S. almost shat my pants when devRant notified my I cannot post and wanted to copy the message and then everything disappeard.. thank god I have written this in the n++ xD
11 -
In one of my first jobs i developed an (ugly and heavly under-payed) e-commerce/media platform for a customer.
That customer was constantly making fun of his bald partner telling how he was gay, liked dicks, etc., drawing dicks and bananas as sample website logos or uploading dildo/penis images as images, he was always like this.
Once the website was ready for production i removed all the "testing" posts and images and told the client to insert some real content and alert me when it was ready for release.
Well some time after the release i got a call from that client, for the first time he was serious:
C: Hi, why there are dildo images on the server? (the website in production was full of dildo/penis images instead of actual product images, he even photoshopped the head of his partner on a penis and uploaded it!!!)
R: ehm... i told you it was on production and to stop uploading bad content....
C: Ummm ok, please fix it immediatly, thanks!3 -
I took this contract and made the suggestion that we backup to the cloud and create a private repo on GIT. Client said no, local should be fine, they don't want someone stealing their code. I said okay fine.
AC just went out in the server room and they apparently had a leak from the AC to the power supply which they happened to put on top of the rack servers and switches. I'm surprised that place didn't catch fire, might be to early to call it.
All this on a Friday and we were 2 weeks away from launch party.
Not my fault, I clearly said we backup to cloud and use GIT on private repo.3 -
I have this interesting client who likes to end the weekly call with a prayer. Once he asked if I wanted to lead the prayer. I said, “No I’m good thanks. You should do it.”7
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Coming back here after years to rant about... myself.
TLDR: I fucked up and now have to call a thousand people as a dev, I'm not even getting paid for it and they all get crazy about a random ID that got assigned to them, so now I want to throw away all my electronics and become a skilift operator.
Stupid me deployed a project shortly before we have the largest amount of orders in the year. (Like 90% of yearly orders in a couple minutes cause they are sold out fast and people wait to order first)
I got this horrible legacy "plain self written framework php" project which I tried to upgrade state of the art.
There was one piece missing to upgrade everything and nicely deploy it to some fresh new servers which can handle the high load which peaks at the time orders open.
So I did it the day before orders open and... everything worked well! Nothing crashed.
I wrote my client to wait a little before he confirms the orders, since after confirmation each of the people who ordered will receive an email where they can choose a unique number which they'll receive as a sticker with the order.
Since it's an event my client is promoting, people will meet each other wearing those unique stickers and being able to identify each other online and in person with this number.
Suddenly my clients call me that "customers are complaining about that there is something wrong"
Turned out he confirmed all orders straight away and that part of the application which makes the number unique was broken on the update.
So everyone could chose any number (also taken ones) as his "unique" number.
In my panic, I told my client "It's my mistake, I'll deal with it of course and call the affected people in my free time, since it's my mistake you don't have to pay for it". (it's my largest client by far, am a freelancer)
Realizing when people can chose any number it'll not be a few ones who have the same, it's like almost everyone did chose "69", "1", "420", "88 (a scary amount of people)",... (with 69 being the number being chosen by most people btw, even more then "1")
So now I have to call about a thousand people telling them a new random ID will be assigned to them. I thought of course about mailing them, wrote a script that deals with the issue automatically, and FUCKED IT UP TOO so everyone is confused and the only way to deal with it is by a call basically.
And while I'm sitting here now for 2 days straight calling people in my free time about their random ID will have to change, I realized that some people are quite crazy about random ID's.
I'm talking about yelling and threatening because "is it too much to ask for a working website when ordering this expensive product".
I hate my life right now and am getting quite serious about throwing all my electronic devices away and become a skilift operator instead. Fuck the higher pay, it's not worth the shit, I wanna have only responsibility about one button to press while watching people fall on their face.5 -
I work as the entire I.T. department of a small business which products are web based, so naturally, I do tech support in said website directly to our clients.
It is normal that the first time a new client access our site they run into questions, but usually they never call again since it is an easy website.
There was an unlucky client which ran into unknown problems and blamed the server.
I couldn't determine the exact cause, but my assumption was a network error for a few seconds which made the site unavailable and the user tried to navigate the site through the navbar and exited the process he was doing. It goes without saying but he was very angry.
I assured him there was nothing wrong with the site, and told him that it would not be charged for this reason. Finally i told him that if he had the same problem, to let me know instead of trying to fix it himself.
The next time he used the site I received a WhatsApp message saying:
- there is something clearly wrong with the site... It has been doing this for so long!
And attached was a 10 second video which showed that he filled a form and never pressed send (my forms have small animations and text which indicates when the form is being send and error messages when an error occurs, usually not visible because the data they send is small and the whole process is quite fast)
To which I answer
- It seems that the form has not been send that's why it looks that way
- So... What an I supposed to do?
- click send
It took a while but the client replied
- ok
To this day I wonder how much time did the client stared at the form cursing the server. -
*About to start an important call with the client*
Neighborhood dogs: "Now is a good time for us to start barking for no reason"3 -
Working with a client on his "superior idea" and suddenly this happens: (longer rant)
tl;dr;
Client wanted me to move a div by 3 millimetres to the left and blamed me for not being capable of doing so while giving him a nonsense about different resolutions and screen sizes. (Use a ruler, DUH)
Me: Here's the updated design layout as our designer specified.
Him: Looks good but it needs to be moved 3 millimetres to the left
Me: *Confused as hell* - Wait, did you just said 3 millimetres?
Him: Yes, is that a problem for you?
Me: *Amazed* Well, yes, you see, we don't measure in millimetres. We use pixels.
Him: Ahh, can't you do anything right!? Why do I have to deal with your nonsense of telling me that this is not impossible? Just take your god damn ruler and put it on your screen, then move it 3 millimetres to the left.
Me: You do realise that every person has a different size/resolution monitor so it won't work?
Him: I don't care. Just do your god damn job or i'll find someone else to do it.
*
Story continued in such manner - we spent an hour on skype moving the stupid <div> around until it hit his 3 millimetres mark.
*
His: See, you could do it.
Me: *Sends him screenshot of my own screen (his was 1024x768, mine 1920x1080) where page is broken and not aligned*
Him: Oh come on, you break every god damn thing. You are the worst. I'm going to find a better one. *hangs skype call*
Him: *3 days later* Hi, so, umm, I've talked to other developers and they said it's impossible to measure in millimetres. Can you revert those changes we did?
After all this I've fully realised that this person is sits at computer very rarely and does not how it even works...5 -
Java dev here. I rewrote an app and replaced a system call to ssh with a modern jaxrs post for uploading a file and (new) some additional data.
I even used a stream.
1 hour in production, first client doesn't get his file. Log says OutOfMemoryError: heap.
Me: wtf? I already use streams.
Looking at the Jersey library. Docs say nothing. An issue from 2013 says: oh if you silly don't use the Apache httpclient addon, we disable chunking and buffer the whole body, because our tests fail with the jdk included http client otherwise.
Me: meh.
No warning in the logs. Thank you soooooo much! Who could have known?4 -
Today somebody claimed they have the "copyright" of responsive websites.
First of all, I'm here for almost a year now, but this is my first rant. Hello guys!
(linuxxx, call me)
This didn't happen to me.
So, it begins like this:
Some client called us and said "[INSERT_COMPANY_NAME] called us and said they have the copyright of all responsive websites, asking money."
I hanged up, laughed hard and visited [INSERT_COMPANY_NAME] website and saw this:
- Each website that uses the solution must report the domain name in order to register it.
- If a company undertakes web site design, it is the company responsibility to inform and record.
- Any unauthorized website will be considered unauthorized and a violation case will be opened.
...
Pricing (Currency Converted to Dollars)
1 Website ~$260
2 - 10 Website ~$1300
...
Well, eventually I reported this to government. I unmasked this fraud.
OR DID I?
Their site is saying this now: "We do not serve this to anyone except government now, you are making nonsense and we do not want nonsense."
So I posted it on a forum, asking what can we do.
We are suing this company now. Yeah, I said "we".
PS: If we cannot win this, I'll get the copyright of subdomains.1 -
Working in a tech company as a project manager, the CEO asked me: a client requested to code the frontend with something call active java, are you familiar with it?
Me: well, it must be a new tech.."searched online..", no results found.
After calling the client, he was asking about React native.🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️ -
New episode on my clients being morons.
Got a call this morning:
Client: hello, we've got a problem here...
Me: tell me about it
C: well... Do you remember the 1200 account we loaded last week ?
Me: yes? What's wrong, we tested them, everything was alright.
C: yeah... But we just noticed we loaded them in the wrong status... Fix that!
Me: easy, we clear the database and load the correct data back.
C: NO WAY! We already worked on 3 accounts. Don't want to lose any of that. Just change the status, it's easy
Me: well not really, there's a lot more going on when you go from one status to another.
C: Don't care, just do it
So... now I need to delete the bad data, checking nothing else gets impacted in the application. And then reload that same data with the proper status this time.
As weird as this sounds like, this is the reason why I love my job. You get challenges like that every single day.4 -
Finally got a call for an interview and they asked if I had any experience with front-end frameworks. I said yeah and they said that that's great since their client needs a UI/UX guy and said they'd get back to me in 2 days.
I got a call from the said client half an hour later who goes, "Hello! I am PersonX from CompanyA and we've got your resume and would like to hire you as a Laravel developer!"
Buddy... it says right there on the top that I'm a front-end developer and you were even checking out my LinkedIn... fuckin' fucktard.3 -
“Hey - just calling you to give you an update”
Great - sorry can you refresh my memory what was this for?
“So I was about to put you through for a client but they’re no longer accepting CVs so just to update you that’s not happening”
Sorry, what was the client again?
“Oh I can’t say, but they’re no longer accepting CVs”
“...Thanks, goodbye.”
*So you call me to tell me that you can’t give my details to a client that you can’t disclosure....get off my line 🤬😡🤬*3 -
Wanna hear a story? The consultancy firm I work for has been hired to work on a WPF project for a big Fashion Industry giant.
We are talking of their most important project yet, the ones the "buyers" use to order them their products globally, for each of the retail stores this Fashion giant has around the world. Do you want to know what I found? Wel, come my sweet summer child.
DB: not even a single foreign key. Impossibile to understand without any priopr working experience on the application. Six "quantity" tables to keep aligned with values that will dictate the quantities to be sent to production (we are talking SKUs here: shoes, bags..)
BE: autogenerated controllers using T4 templates. Inputs directly serialized in headers. Async logging (i.e. await Logger.Error(ex)). Entities returned as response to the front end, no DTOs whatsoever.
WPF: riddled with code behind and third party components (dev express) and Business Logic that should belong to the Business Layer. No real api client, just a highly customized "Rest Helper". No error reporting or dealing with exceptions. Multiple endpoints call to get data that would be combined into one single model which happens to be the one needed by the UI. No save function: a timer checks the components for changes and autosaves them every x seconds. Saving for the most critical part occurring when switching cells or rows, often resulting in race conditions at DB level.
What do you think of this piece of shit?6
